"If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse."-- Jim Rohn
Mary and Tom Poppendieck, in their book, Lean Software Development, lay out a finely compiled guide of the lean principles that can be applied to software development. They rightly caution against the misapplication of manufacturing and civil engineering practices to software development:
"Software development has tried to model its practices after manufacturing and civil engineering, with decidedly mixed results. This has been due in part to a naive understanding of the true nature of these disciplines and a failure to recognize the limits of the metaphor."
As the authors have pointed out in the book, it is this failure to recognize the limits of the metaphor that is prevalent in product teams. The mindset of thinking that software development is akin to manufacturing/production has a huge implication on how teams perceive software practices. We place...